4 key pillars of IT standardization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Standardizing technology brings simplicity and consistency to often complex patchworks of operating systems (OSs), platforms, and tools that can end up creating more issues than they solve. 

IT standardization can be performed in a number of ways, including ensuring all users employ the same OS, applications, tools, commands, or processes across all IT environments. By standardizing on a single OS, such as Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, organizations can solve a number of common IT challenges, including improving operational efficiency and business agility, enhancing their focus on security, and building internal skills.

While many organizations have successfully deployed workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for years, some also have workloads on other OSs and Linux distributions, which results in increased infrastructure complexity and cost of ownership. Consider the following reasons to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

IT infrastructure often encompasses a mixture of server hardware, many different OSs, and a variety of management tools. 

Complex IT environments like this require highly skilled teams to manage them without delayed provisioning, increased downtime, greater security and compliance risks, and other operational disruptions. 

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies your IT infrastructure and its management complexity, which allows you to:

• Optimize operational efficiency by ensuring consistency across all workloads.
• Streamline processes with consistent tools and resources.
• Improve focus on security and compliance with increased visibility into your operating environment.
• Lower operating expenses (OpEx), increase uptime, accelerate provisioning and deployment, and improve IT and user productivity.

It is imperative to support your level of standardization with increased flexibility and agility, and the right OS will help you achieve this. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux lets you build, deploy, and manage current and future workloads in a cloud environment, on-premise, in containers, or at the edge of a network with speed, consistency, and portability. 

This flexible platform supports innovation and growth by allowing you to:

• Spend more time on innovation with centralized development and management. 
• Flexibly react to business needs with fully portable applications and containers. 
• Maintain existing applications while developing and deploying new technologies on a consistent foundation. 
• Simplify or reduce the need for workload migration with application stability and backward compatibility. 
• Access Red Hat’s extensive partner ecosystem to flexibly choose the partners you work with. 
• Streamline paths from development to production with standard configurations and built-in automation capabilities.

A layered security strategy is needed to efficiently manage risk, protect data, provide user authentication and access policies, encrypt data, ensure correct system configuration, and help enforce compliance mandates across managed deployments.

While no single solution can do this on its own, the right OS can establish the foundation for an increased focus on system security and integration with other solutions to implement a layered security strategy across your infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Insights—a service included in your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription—support this with: 

• Built-in security features—including automated security controls—and security profiles. 
• Proactive analytics, vulnerability alerts, targeted guidance, and remediation playbooks. 
• Critical security upgrades and live patches, often within 24 hours of a critical vulnerability being made public. 
• Security standards certification for most governmental and industry mandates.
• A security-focused software supply chain that validates all components delivered by Red Hat.

The increasing popularity of Linux as an OS and the surge in hybrid cloud use have left many organizations with skills gaps that restrict their ability to effectively manage a hybrid or multicloud environment.

Skills gaps in your organization can be mitigated by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which helps you streamline processes with consistent tools built on decades of Red Hat experience. This allows you to reduce the staffing and resources required to manage those processes and retain skills, standards, processes, best practices, and management tools across a hybrid cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also helps bridge skills gaps in your organization with: 

• A shared library of resources accessible through the Red Hat Knowledge Base to help guide your team through complex issues.
• A web console included on every Red Hat Enterprise Linux host. This web-based administration interface’s capabilities include service, security, storage, and user management.
• Access to Insights, which uses Red Hat’s extensive Linux experience and expertise to provide proactive analytics and remediation tools that support your team’s management efforts.